You inspired me to make a proper breakdown of my sentence as well.
We are sailing to the city.
In oppidum nāvigāmus.
| Latin | Explanation |
|---|---|
| in | Latin in covers both the English prepositions in and on. It also has some grammatical uses that I’m still getting to grips with, and this sentence employs one of them. Here it’s being used to indicate direction towards, to, or into a place. |
| oppidum | An oppidum was a fortified town. As Sanonius said, urbs, mūnicipium, colōnia, and cīvitās could also have been used in various contexts. The word is in the accusative case, apparently because that’s just how it’s done when you use it in this grammatical structure. Oppidum is explicitly singular (its plural is oppida). In Latin there was no linguistic distinction between definite nouns (“the city”) and indefinite nouns (“a city”). |
| nāvigāmus | The root of this word is nāvigō (to sail.) It derives from nāvis (ship). In Latin a verb can be conjugated to show person (first, second, third), pluralism, and over twenty tenses. Thus each verb can presumably accept over a hundred conjugations, making it extremely expressive. Therefore Latin rarely requires pronouns to be used. There are four conjugation patterns. Nāvigō is in the first conjugation, which is described at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_first_conjugation. We want the first-person plural form of the active indicative tense, which is nāvigāmus. |
PS. In Volapük, the first popular constructed language, verbs could be inflected in 1,584 ways.